Josh Stomel is once again the talk of the lead gen world with his recent post on LowerMyBills revenue projections. Given that the company did less than $100mm in 2004 and less than $50mm in 2003, upon hearing that number I initially assumed it was for all of Experian Interactive. (NexTag, number 2 or 3 in the mortgage/refinance space does less than half of LMBs projected 2005 number for mortgage.) Given that Experian Interactive has a strong affiliate play (with Affiliate Fuel and MetaReward) and that until the purchase earlier this year, LowerMyBills was absent from affiliate marketing, it is possible that the $160mm+ number is accurate. I wouldn't have expected $2mm+ monthly from the affiliate channel, but that is what I would have to guess that channel's contribution is. Impressive and sure to serve as a distraction for a few others in the space.

By now, almost everybody outside the Internet world has heard of Google. Similarly, thanks to its first mover status and ubiquitous blanketing of American mailboxes and retail outlets with CD-ROMs, you’ll be hard pressed to find someone that hasn’t heard of AOL. For those that somehow managed to avoid mention of either company over the past 15 years, the ante just got raised as the two have dominated industry and general media coverage for the recently announced $1 billion investment by Google in exchange for 5% of AOL and among other things an extended search pact. Consider this week’s Trends Report a, “We sort through all the stories so you don’t have to.” And there are a lot of them. We’re just happy we didn’t publish the story last week when it looked like MSN was sure to win the AOL business.

A lot has changed in two and a half weeks. Looking over the news from the beginning of the month, you would have seen headlines such as “Microsoft May Have Edge in AOL deal and “Report: Microsoft and AOL Deal Close.” These past few days, the headlines read “Google Outfoxes Microsoft Again” and “Google Checkmates Microsoft on the Web.” With the deal signed, this certainly seems the case, although we see that a few saw the Google / AOL partnership not as a triumph but as a sign of potential weakness. For example, rather than praising Google, the Wall Street Journal said “Google Goes on Defensive with AOL Stake Buy.” Only time will tell there though.

At the most fundamental level, any deal with AOL comes down to money. Google has a vested interest in AOL as they add more than $300 million to their top line. That is more than enough money to help Microsoft jump start their own fledgling search business built off its first generation advertiser platform, Ad Center. For AOL, the deal means more than just the $300 million it earns in search. The deal secures its lifeline as the company looks to Internet advertising revenues to replace its well-documented declining subscriber revenue. Yahoo was mentioned in the early talks, but did not choose to participate in the final round of talks.

An AOL deal with MSN would have made sense on levels other than helping Microsoft with search. MSN and AOL share much in common – from the ad units to their strategy. Each company wants to compete with Yahoo and ultimately with Google. An alliance could have put both on the map and given their respective internal sales teams a chance to sell more of what they already sell. Immediately, they could have become a sizable display ad and search entity. That combination though would have come with some significant operational challenges for both companies.

Working with Google will still require solid execution on AOL’s part, but it provides a baseline if none of that execution occurs – the status quo and an extra billion dollars. True, AOL will most likely get some favored nation status within Google’s own search results and buying opportunities on its AdSense network. But, making that work will rest on AOL. Google on the other hand gets access to AOL’s vast content, which includes video and other sought after media formats. There is little doubt that Google will successfully execute on their end to leverage what AOL offers. And, while a technological laggard, the AOL brand brings a maturity that brand advertisers trust, something Google desperately wants.

Coverage of Google’s investment into AOL wouldn’t be complete without mention of investor Carl Icahn, who owns 3% of AOL. He questions whether the deal with Google provides the best choice for realizing the value of the “AOL asset.” In his letter to the board of directors he says that he is “not opposed to the Board using its business judgment to enter into a transaction with Google or another suitor so long as the transaction does not destroy or impede Time Warner's flexibility to unlock shareholder value in the near and long term.” Mr. Icahn mentions other suitors in this letter but does not show a preference for any particular company. He focuses on finding the best choice, and there is a real case to be made that Google represents the best short term choice but not long term choice. Again, the onus for realizing the value of the investment really falls upon AOL not Google. The one who spends the money generally will find a way to get their money’s worth. That is not always true of the one who gets the money.

In the end, or we should say in the beginning, The AOOOOOL story started three and a half years ago when Google beat out Overture to supply the “You’ve got mail” site with its paid search listings. I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it chose to step up yet again. At least Google has finally helped solve one lingering question – what they planned on doing with their $4 billion secondary offering “defensive” war chest. Their $1 billion investment earned them not just 5% of AOL but an estimated 7% of the search market. Who wouldn’t want 7% of the search market for $1 billion? IAC paid almost $2 billion for less than four percent. While not quite that easy, even viewing the deal as Google paying $200 million per year for $300 million in revenue and perhaps $45 million in search profit isn’t that bad of a deal. In the end, the deal is Google’s to lose. They have the money, and they have the confidence to confront those who saw their willingness to buy a stake of AOL as a sign of weakness. And, when AOL gets spun off from Time Warner and goes public, they will yet again look like smart ones. And did we mention AIM?

In “Finding the Sweet Spot,” last week’s article on the Internet advertising acquisition landscape, we grouped the majority of activity along four main lines – lead generation, comparison shopping, content networks, and ad/affiliate networks. In addition to the four categories of activity, two companies stuck out as being candidates for a large capital event in the upcoming months. The two, NexTag and Quinstreet, may seem dissimilar at first, the former known for its comparison shopping, the latter for its lead generation business, but a closer look reveals they have one major thing in common – significant lead generation activity. They also seem to desire an exit on the high end of the current purchase spectrum, perhaps approaching the arbitrary but really exciting $1 billion mark. In this week’s Digital Thoughts, we look more closely at the lead generation space and some of the specific challenges that face lead generation companies such as edu champ Quinstreet and mortgage giant NexTag, looking to go “wide and deep” and exit big.

Surveying the lead generation landscape, one thing sticks out – that not one lead generation company plays a dominant role in more than one vertical. Some, such as Azoogle and Adteractive have done a commendable, i.e. seven figure monthly, job building large businesses in both, but neither yet ranks among the top three for either. What makes it tough for any one lead generation company to dominate more than one vertical has to do with the nature of the lead generation model. By definition the business involves three pieces - buyers of the lead data, a platform for collection and distribution of the data, and traffic. Once a company successfully scales all three for one vertical, it seems reasonable that doing so for a second vertical should take fewer resources and less work than the first time; but lead generation has yet to work that way. To better understand this we’ll look at mortgage and education, two of the biggest, most mature lead generation verticals.

Mortgage lead generation is perhaps the oldest and most established vertical. While it didn’t start out this way, today, almost all companies who sell data to mortgage banks use a standardized form. Whether you work with Countrywide or East Carolina County Bank, the data fields they receive are the same. From an aggregator’s perspective this means that they only have to design one form for their landing page. Differentiation occurs on the backend. One bank will have different criteria than the next, e.g. minimum loan value, loan to value ratio, etc. Taking on a new client though means making modifications to the database not to the design. In addition, taking on a new client generally means potential incremental revenue as the vast percentage of mortgage lead generation works on a shared model. Mortgage lead aggregators will sell a lead up to four times, something popularized by Lending Tree in their television spots. Other markets do not currently support this.

The education market, for example has, on the whole, little tolerance for shared leads. Rather than it being the norm, it’s the exception with only a handful of companies being= allowed to present more than one school to a user. Even in those rare cases, the user must still opt-in to the different schools rather than automatically being sent to up to four schools. What this means is that with mortgage, the user does not necessarily know who will get their lead upon hitting submit. Whereas, with education, the top schools all want the users to have chosen to receive information from their school. This means companies in education must build many landing pages, not just one. Each school client will have their own form, and will run lead generation campaigns for a particular school or for a quasi-portal that will drive students to a school they select.

In education, the lack of a shared lead model is primarily driven by regulation. Accreditation plays a big role in the post secondary education institutions. The governing bodies that decide this are not marketers and have pulled a school’s accreditation for choosing certain market techniques, e.g. incentivized leads. Mortgage too has strict regulations, but they differ greatly from the education space. Theirs, for instance, does not focus on how the leads were generated.

Even if the schools buying the data had greater tolerance for being promoted along side others, the variation in their forms makes it difficult. Unlike mortgage, it’s not as simple as asking for first name, last name, etc. and focusing on whether the buyer knows it as “fname” or “first_name.” With education, you also have different buyers having not just different names for the variables but you have very little consistency in which form fields they want. Were you to take four different schools and try to create one single form, instead of the 12 fields needed for one, you would end up with a total of 30 so that each school could collect the information they needed. This variation in data makes it very difficult not only to manage education well but extremely challenging to build a unified lead platform for multiple verticals. Ideally, you would want one comprehensive set of fields on the backend. Executing on that strategy means you wind up with an ever growing list that becomes a bear to standardize.

To compound the challenge of multi-vertical dominance, traffic acts differently. NexTag has had great success with mortgage but not with education. Quinstreet has rocked portions of the education segment but has not done well in mortgage. Both companies have extensive media buying prowess, ample technology talent, and an existing track record of executing. What we see though is that ultimately, the specific needs of the data buyers from field information to buying model to regulations impacted their operations combined with the challenges of building a unified lead platform and difficulty in mastering the specifics of traffic in each vertical, mean that moving from one vertical to the next is a multiple of prior effort not a fraction. It seems that moving into a new vertical would be easy, but it really isn’t. Instead, it really is like building a new business from scratch. Will someone figure out how to rule more than one category? Of course, and one or two companies are getting close. Just don’t assume that because you do well in one you will do as well in another.

The sweet spot for selling right now seems to lie right around a half a billion dollars. More companies than not have sold for less, much less, but there is something about that $500 million number that has many companies saying “I do.” This includes companies like LowerMyBills.com who sold for $380, About.com that went for just north of $400 million along with MySpace, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, IGN, PriceGrabber, all of whom sold right around the $500 million sweet spot, if not a little more. Look through that short list and you’ll see it represents three areas of merger and acquisition interest – comparison shopping, lead aggregators, and ad networks.

At one level, reaching a valuation of one billion is all about the numbers. Most of the lead generation and comparison shopping sites that sold this year generated north of $100 million with healthy margins, and they received valuations based on their financials, not on hype. Were they doing closer to $300 million annually, they could justify a ten figure sale price instead of nine. Thus far, none have achieved that. This week, take a look at some of the more acquisitive verticals and the companies that operate in them to understand the factors of growth and why companies in some of them can sell for more than others.

With respect to lead generation, no company has sold for more than $500 million. Of those that remain, two seem bent on going for more than that, Quinstreet and Nextag. The former makes its money almost exclusively from lead generation, whereas the latter operates in two verticals. They started out in comparison shopping but used their comparison branding goodwill and media expertise to move effectively into the mortgage lead generation space. Quinstreet is in many ways, the LowerMyBills of the post-secondary education space. They have a heavy concentration in one vertical and are among only a very small handful of companies that do eight figures monthly in the education space. Their revenues most likely put them close – in the $650 million to $700 million valuation range.

Lead generation and comparison shopping share more in common than it might first seem. The former tends to involve larger transactions and a soft-sell while the latter does well with smaller, very specific, mostly retail items. Despite their fundamental transactional differences, lead generation and comparison shopping both involve connecting a user with a company. Comparison shopping, gets a commission on the sale as opposed to a bounty for the introduction, but fundamentally, they help serve the same purpose. They also share size valuations in common. Both land solidly in the $500 million range, a little more depending on revenue, margin, and position…but close enough really.

My buddy and industry stud John DeMayo encapsulates this well in his “Go Wide or Go Deep” post. LowerMyBills and Quinstreet have both gone very deep; they hold a dominant position in one vertical, perhaps at the expense of others. Others, such as Adteractive and AzoogleAds have done a commendable job at establishing a presence in more than one vertical, although neither has achieved the Holy Grail, i.e. both wide and deep. His wide and deep terminology, though, is helpful in explaining our upcoming evaluation criteria.

On a more granular level, the factors for evaluating a particular segment come down to some combination of the following – number of advertisers, advertiser breadth, audience reach (includes direct buys on media, along with publishers for those that have publisher / affiliate relationships), audience breadth, and advertiser automation / scalability, i.e. the threshold for a profitable client. Combined, these factors make up the wide and deep of a company or segment’s advertising and traffic base, ones that also try to take into account how easily a segment could scale. All together, these should help explain why certain segments produce large companies and why certain companies are larger than others. In Part 2, we apply these factors to several verticals and look at what combination yields the greatest returns.

A company’s financials are an affect of their business. In Part 1 located here, we laid the groundwork for our discussion on understanding and evaluating why certain companies attain the size they do. The result was a set of criteria, that when combined could help evaluation and understand the size and scope of a company. We will look at these segments based on the following – number of advertisers, advertiser breadth, audience reach (includes direct buys on media along with publishers for those that have publisher / affiliate relationships), audience breadth, and advertiser automation / scalability, i.e. the threshold for a profitable client. As seen in our Internet advertising overview, companies operate in a multitude of segments. We decided to look at those which have seen the greatest level of merger and acquisition activity in the past two years – lead generation, comparison shopping, and ad networks / affiliate networks. Thus, while we look at only three, this framework should be robust enough for use in other segments of the online advertising space.

We kick off with lead generation and comparison shopping. These two segments both service about the same number of clients. A given vertical, such as mortgage or education can have up to 1000 clients, with five to ten covering more than 80% of the revenues. The coverage of those clients is very narrow. All fall into very specific channels, so while there are a lot of clients, they are all competing for a subset of user interest. The audience that the lead generation companies and comparison shopping companies can reach is large – these guys make good money – but it’s not yet huge. For the most part too, both types of companies have manual interactions with their clients. They do not have a self-service interface that supports a large percentage of the business. Until lead generation becomes more portable and comparison shopping captures greater ecommerce market share, both will remain sizable but capped.

Ad networks and affiliate networks, while not the current belle of the acquisition ball, have seen some sizable transactions. Both Advertising.com and Linkshare went for more than $400 million. And Fastclick was purchased for $200 million by Valueclick with Webclients coming close at $140 million. Let’s look at each using the evaluation criteria above. Ad networks service a smaller number of clients on average than affiliate networks and roughly the same as those in the lead generation and comparison shopping space, about 100 effectively and up to 1000. Like lead generation and comparison shopping the top 10 clients can account for a bulk of the revenues. Affiliate networks can service 1000 to 10,000; they have a longer tail with respect to their advertisers.

Ad networks tend to offer limited audience segmentation although they do not hit each segment nearly as deep as lead generation companies do. Affiliate networks can offer even greater granularity than the 15 to 30 categories that the average ad network can hit. Where ad networks truly excel and affiliate networks to a lesser extent is in reach. LowerMyBills, the most prolific of the lead generation advertisers shows 2 billion impressions per month. A large ad network can show that many in a day. Yet, adding advertisers to ad networks, like lead generation and comparison shopping, is a fairly manual process involving sales and support staff. Affiliate networks offer greater automation, which explains their much larger advertiser set; what they lack though is the traffic that the networks maintain. The networks might have a smaller advertiser base but in many ways it’s by design as they play a much more active role in the media buying process.

So that this article can be kept to a manageable length, we will apply the evaluation criteria to a larger set of industries – co-registration, incentive promotion, content networks, adware, behavioral networks, etc. in another article or perhaps a follow-up post online. More criteria might be added as well, but even this small set and the three industries covered – lead generation, comparison shopping, and ad networks / affiliate networks – gives us enough to make some interesting conclusions and observations. Again, using John’s wide and deep terminology, the profitable businesses today – Advertising.com, Shopping.com, Quinstreet, NexTag, and so on, are a mixed bag of wide and deep on the advertiser and publisher side.

One key takeaway from this – going deep on the advertiser front, i.e. focusing on a particular set, can help a company scale, but one needs to go wide to become a giant. The path to continued growth for any internet advertising company is to find ways to accept a larger and more diverse advertiser set and have a product offering that services a larger and more fragmented audience / publisher community. Doing this usually means automating the customer acquisition process and creating a self-service interface that links to distribution. Paid search is a prime example. Overture was wide and deep with advertisers. Their keyword approach and volume of searches along with the self-service interface allowed them to grow into a billion dollar company that serviced 100,000 plus advertisers, even those paying only $25 per month.

How could Overture become even larger? They could have gone deep on the publisher end, something Yahoo! is trying to do now. They could have built / bought the contextual technology that turns display inventory into search like inventory. It’s this technology that helped extend Google’s reach beyond search and go deep on the publisher side. It’s what allows them to service not only a large, diverse advertiser set but also an equally broad publisher set. No other company, except now Yahoo!, can monetize sites large and small so effectively. These companies have absolutely changed the face of display advertising and given the rest of us a model by which we can grow our companies. Go wide but not deep or deep but not wide and it’s $500 million; go wide and deep and the sky is the limit...you might just have to buy your way there though.

I've recently written on Google and my belief that they leverage, not to mention create, market ineffeciencies for their gain. That lead me to conclude that Google's "Do No Evil" might warrant a change to "No Mercy."

Recent data from speaking to publishers and advertisers leads me to believe that their main mission - "To organize the world's information..." should be "To control the world's information." They are the new gatekeeper, one whose natural search and paid search algorithms' opacity allows them to determine what is truly relevant. It's a marketplace to a point, except that those spending on it and those trying profit from it, i.e. the advertisers and publishes, are kept in the dark.

Whether Google is doing this is purely speculative and borderline conspiracy theory. What is true is that the tipping point of not using Google is here and soon that point will be reached with respect to commerce online. This is really rough idea that I will hopefully work into a more formal article.

Much like an auto race where the top few cars battle it out for number one, the fight for other positions can be as exciting, if not more so, than the one going on at the front of the pack. It’s like the Masters golf tournament. Being number one is what you want, but as long as you finish high enough to get the automatic invite next year, that’s almost as important. So, if by chance you are a little too focused on the battle for number one, you are missing some amazing positioning. In other words, while many watch what Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft do, others take advantage of the distraction caused by the top media guys to gain significant ground without drawing too much attention. Chief among them is GUS plc’s Experian Interactive who as early as today (but most likely Wednesday) will announce the purchase of Price Grabber.

With the purchase of PriceGrabber. Experian now owns, this year alone, one affiliate marketing company, Affiliate Fuel, one of the most prolific online mortgage lead generation companies with LowerMyBills, a premier online education lead generation company, ClassesUSA, and soon one of the more sophisticated comparison shopping sites. The rumors of the acquisition have been several weeks in the making and a cryptic FTC document supports those rumors. The price is not known but expect it to top LowerMyBill’s $380 million. It should; however land south of the $620 million paid for Shopping.com. Our guess is a cash deal of $470 million in all. It’s a lot of money, but GUS plc, the parent company of Experian Interactive has one major advantage – a favorable exchange rate.

With Price Grabber off the market, it’s time to look at what other companies possess similar assets to Experian Interactive. The first is Valueclick. They too have an affiliate network, Commission Junction, which powers some of the nets biggest brands. Advantage Valueclick in the affiliate arena. Valueclick also has Websponsors, whom they purchased this year in a $140 million dollar deal; it’s a unit that operates as a cross between MetaReward and Affiliate Fuel. It runs a publisher network that relies heavily on incentive promotions, an area that MetaReward helped pioneer. Valueclick has the volume advantage, MetaReward the maturity. Call it a tie on the incentive promotion front. Through Websponsors, Valueclick also has the ability to do large-scale lead generation. Unlike Experian, Valueclick does not possess any strong, consumer facing brands. Their leads come mainly from email and co-registration, giving value but not necessarily the same level of quality. The win goes to Experian with respect to lead generation, although Valuelick operates in more verticals at the moment.

Valueclick has a few assets that that Experian Interactive does not, one of them being that they are among the largest online advertising networks. With their purchase of Fastclick, Valueclick Media will show more than 10 times the number of ad impressions that Experian’s LowerMyBill’s does. The other asset, while currently a major one is a Tier 2/3 paid search engine, Search123. By default, ValueClick takes the lead. Both companies, however, run comparison shopping sites. Not to be confused with Price Grabber, Valueclick operates Price Runner, a leading comparison shopping site in the UK and select European countries that they hope to expand to the US. A query for “Sony Bravia 40” brings up the exact product in PriceGrabber but only category listings in Price Runner. Experian wins hands-down in this segment.

When compared in total revenues from online operations, Valueclick certainly wins. The company earned $170 million last year and should top $250 million this year. That puts them at least $100 million ahead of what Experian Interactive will do. Both companies have one thing that very few others currently have; the ability to market to customers at all phases in the purchase lifecycle. But, if it comes to a showdown, Valueclick’s revenue lead might not insulate them for long, as Experian’s parent company has a stronger track record of integration and a core competency of customer data servicing that puts them in a league of their own. Don’t count out lead generation giants Quinstreet and the quite profitable NexTag. Both will be seeking some capital event very shortly, and will need to in order to go head to head with Experian.

Regardless what Experian does with PriceGrabber, the company shows one thing. They really “get it” and realize just how significant a company they can put together. The data they have combined with their reach makes even Claria seem trivial. In May, the company was the 15th largest Internet company by revenue. Now, they might have broken the top 10. Don’t expect them to stop anytime soon. If they can execute on closer to 100%, then they might just vie for a space at the top and not just as the leader in the race for second. On a final note, this acquisition also shows the value of connections. LowerMyBills’ Matt Coffin was friends with Experian Interactive’s Ed Ojdana, and if you look at the PriceGrabber deal, you’ll see similar connection. Building a great business works wonders, but already knowing the potential suitors; that’s like getting to play in the Masters.

People blog for a variety of reasons. For many, it offers a chance to be heard, to be discovered, and/or to network. If you are really good you can even make money along with making an impact. I started blogging for a similar reason, vanity, or better said, posterity. Earlier this year, if you typed my name into Google and performed a search, one of the top results would be an article from the online version of the independent newspaper of the University of Akron. It’s a well-written and informative piece from September 2004; unfortunately, for me it references a Kenneth Jay Weintraub, a convicted sex offender. Even though it is not me, it’s not what I would like people seeing even associated with my name.

The desire for posterity poses new and interesting challenges, and what you realize is that we have no control over our online data. Take for example the fairly well publicized incident with former Robert Kennedy assistant John Seigenthaler Sr., who found information about himself online; not under a similar name but his own on Wikipedia. The free, editable by anyone encyclopedia offers reference listings on hundreds of thousands of items is something I only wished I had in school. It has entries on so many things it’s hard to believe. It also had an entry on Mr. Seigenthaler. Unfortunately, that information was incorrect. As many have pointed out, that doesn’t mean Wikipedia itself is a bad concept. That it has amassed a following this large and only now had a public incident after four years says a lot. Even so, they do not have the same type of accountability that those writing in print have, where recourse exists for false and misleading entries.

MySpace, the indirect subject of this week’s Business Week represents another example of wholes in accountability. After growing more than 600% this year and being acquired in a highly lucrative, highly covered acquisition, they have just now started to receive a little more scrutiny. Parents now realize that the site, and more importantly the behavior, is not a fad and are paying attention. What they see are kids lying about their age in order to access certain features of the site. And, given that we are in the first iteration of the wired generation, there are actions whose consequences we cannot know until the future arrives. One in particular comes from the information that these young MySpacers post. Many use the site for showing off pictures of parties they attended – images that would seem right at home on the Girls Gone Wild videos.

I can only imagine what parents will think if they see this, and that’s what many of those who post, most likely, don’t realize. The content they post on the sites is there; it’s not going away. When I did a search for myself, I was surprised to find (no, not any pictures) but a comment I had made to an email digest list more than five years ago that was archived online. We already hear of stories of lovers who go their separate ways only for one to find revealing pictures of themselves online because the, now lesser half, chose to breach their confidence. The same will only happen en masse as this current generation of online users grows up. They will find those pictures they posted years later; and, if they don’t, then there is an equally good chance their future partner, future boss, or even their kids might.

Perhaps the most alarming fact about the current state of digital content comes from its permanence. Those of us in marketing try so hard to get listed, but just imagine if the opposite were true. What if you didn’t want to have something available online? Then, what would you do? Only in a few cases have we heard about people successfully having certain information removed. The downside is that you won’t really know or remember what content you produced or someone else produced about you. Nor will you necessarily know who uses it. Thanks to caching technology, even if you modify content on a site, the older version probably still exists somewhere. Unfortunately, there is no clear answer to the lack of accountability. If an underage person on MySpace naively decides to meet someone who then turns out to harm them, should MySpace be to blame? If you had some images up on a site that you took down but later found cached on an engine, should you have the ability for that content to be taken down?

As consumers, we have value. Companies want to reach us and without us companies could not function. The credit system is funny and potentially flawed as it hoards data but provides no insight or recourse for mistakes. Our online, transparent behavior would seem to solve that; yet, in actuality, we have only ended up recreating the same problem. What we produce online is much more visible and open for scrutiny than that being held by the big data companies. But, we are only one step ahead. We can at least see what we have done or is being said but cannot easily rectify it. That makes Google the next Experian in many ways, and that is a scary thought. Perhaps only if, as consumers, we truly own all the data we produce, which includes having the ability to remove it, will this issue be resolved. I don’t know whether I have enough faith in our own accountability for that to come true.

Quite a few visitors have come to this site searching for "Adteractive Debt." While, no one has written in specifically on that topic, it has been said that in lieu of taking in private equity money the company did do an eight figure debt financing. Given what was said in my Quinstreet IPO rumor post, I will speculate that the funds were used that m&a activity. I would also hypothesize that the company has aggressive plans to beef up its infrastructure and media buying.